A legal thriller with some uneven characterizations redeemed by a satisfying conclusion.
An elderly woodsman’s will leads to a legal fight over his valuable farmstead in Searle’s mystery novel.
Minnesota newsman Boston Meade interviews Leif Nielsen, a former forest ranger, who represents the last of a dying breed of woodsmen. Leif is determined to protect his farmstead on Tarn Lake, one of the last undeveloped pieces of land in the area. When a bout of pneumonia lands Leif in the hospital, the value of his property attracts the attention of his brother, Harald Nielsen, and Harald’s ambitious wife, Regina. They draft a will for Leif that gives Harald power of attorney. When Leif dies suddenly, the Nielsens are enraged to discover that Leif went behind their backs and left his estate to a professor, Sandy Brewster, who had been like a son to him. The Nielsens plan to contest the will on the grounds that Leif was mentally incompetent, and they intend to fight dirty. Sandy needs the support of allies like Meade if he is to honor Leif’s wishes. But how far are the Nielsens willing to go? The heart of the story is Sandy’s fight for Leif’s legacy—unfortunately, this theme is often overshadowed by the cartoonishly villainous exploits of Harald and Regina. (Regina, especially, increasingly becomes a man-eating cliche as the story progresses, and the time the author spends on the couple seems wasted.) The passages about Leif’s passion for the land contain the book’s most artful prose: “He pecked out descriptions of hanging gardens with a few flowers, grass and ferns clinging to tiny ledges…Each thin stratum of rock read like a page from half a billion years of planetary history.” Sandy’s task in the story is to prevent this beauty from being lost to Harald and Regina’s scheming—the narrative should have followed his example. Still, it takes a skilled writer to make a legal battle over a will a page-turner; Searle deftly fills potentially dry conversations about land preservation with drama and tension.
A legal thriller with some uneven characterizations redeemed by a satisfying conclusion.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781960250964
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Calumet Editions
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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